Viet Nam a Gathering of Ghosts

By Pico Iyer

Ten years, almost to the minute, after a U.S. helicopter whisked the last American officials out of Viet Nam at the end of a long and bloody war, the anniversary parade began. Along appropriately named 30th of April Street, in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, there flowed last week a motley assortment of patriotic props. Goose-stepping soldiers marched in front of children waving hoops and colored handkerchiefs. Leftover U.S.-made armored personnel carriers followed rumbling Soviet-built T-54 tanks. Roller skaters mingled with medal-bedecked veterans, motorcyclists, and workers bearing a picture of Ho Chi Minh hoisting barbells above a legend that exhorted, LET EVERYONE DO EXERCISES IN THE MORNING.

Jubilant and eclectic, yet a little ragged with the tatterdemalion feel of a county fair, Viet Nam's show of national pride captured perfectly, if unwittingly, the country's paradoxical fate: having prevailed over a superpower, Viet Nam has yet to come wholly to grips with itself. The nine aging Politburo members who waved stiffly from a reviewing stand could relish the memory of how they had stripped the American Goliath of $150 billion, 58,022 lives and, for a while, some of its self-confidence. But ten years after its moment of glory, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam has little else to cheer about. Its army, the world's fourth largest (1.2 million men), remains at war and on alert: 160,000 of its troops are trying to subdue resistance fighters in neighboring Kampuchea, while another 650,000 men keep an uneasy peace along the Chinese border. The relaxed, Westward-looking laissez-faire of the South has yet to be completely assimilated within the socialist puritanism of the North. And despite $2 billion in aid from the Soviet Union each year, Viet Nam remains desperately poor.

Even the staging of last week's festivities suggested that victory was, in some respects, Pyrrhic. To bring its triumph home to the world once again, xenophobic Viet Nam, which allowed all of 252 tourists to enter in 1983, welcomed 400 journalists and technicians from abroad, most of them American (see PRESS). To many observers, the willingness to accommodate the newsmen underlined Hanoi's eagerness to restore relations with Washington. For all its efforts, however, Viet Nam's peace offensive seemed unlikely to gain any ground.

Ambivalence, indeed, seemed to be a keynote of the celebrations. Just before the parade got under way, Nguyen Van Linh, Communist Party secretary for Ho Chi Minh City, rose to celebrate Viet Nam's place "among the vanguard fighters for mankind's lofty ideals" and to extol its success in "overturning the global counterrevolutionary strategy of U.S. imperialism." But even Linh could not overlook the signs of decay around him. In Ho Chi Minh City (pop. 3.5 million) the walls of many houses are cracked, and the electricity supply is a sometime thing. Thousands sleep on the unswept sidewalks, and official corruption is said to be worse than it ever was.

The war, said Linh, left in its wake "a million unemployed and a large contingent of prostitutes, drug addicts, vagabonds and hooligans." Ten years later, he claimed, "the reactionary and depraved neocolonialist culture, which has spoiled so much of our youth, remains our most acute and persistent danger."

Certainly, Ho Chi Minh City today preserves much of the resourcefulness of the Saigon of old, like a fading madam who still has jewelry to sell. Pedicab drivers offer Western passengers "beautiful young girls," while street entrepreneurs compete to buy dollars at several times the official (100 to 1) rate. In the black market along Nguyen Hue Street, a few trendsetters wearing body shirts, designer jeans and modish sunglasses wander among stalls crammed with the latest in color TVs and stereo systems.

Above all, memories from the days of the war still linger. Just off what used to be Tu Do Street (renamed Dong Khoi Street), an attractive 52-year-old woman serves drinks in a bar that used to be known as the Casino. Once upon a time she owned a bar herself, she remembers with a smile, and played cards over the counter with G.I.s. Now she ekes out a living by peddling goods sent her by American friends. What little money she has earned she has lost in trying, and failing, three times to escape the country. Still, she says wistfully, "if I can save some money, maybe I will try again."

Variations on that theme are heard throughout a land divided by its memory. On a ferry from My Tho to Ben Tre, a slender man in his 40s tells TIME Photographer Dirck Halstead about his training in New Mexico for the South Vietnamese army. Now, he says, he works on a collective farm, digging ditches and planting crops. Is his life better? "I think it is better now," he says, his eyes darting nervously toward the other passengers. Then, lowering his voice, he confesses that it is worse. "Everyone is so poor. The former regime was no good, I know, but now there is no hope."

During the anniversary celebrations, some journalists were entertained at the home of Brigadier General Nguyen Huu Hanh, who was briefly Deputy Chief of Staff of the South Vietnamese army, though rumored to have ties with the Viet Cong Communist insurgents. Under the new regime he enjoys a token position, but no power. Now he ruminated about shortages--food and gasoline and electricity--in a grand old house that was half empty, thick with dust, and stifling under a broken fan.

Prisoners of a different kind are the inmates--mostly former government officials and military officers (an estimated 10,000 countrywide)--of a showcase "re-education center" outside Ho Chi Minh City that is prettily landscaped with lotus ponds and lyrical gardens. The frightened-looking men, sallow-faced and hollow-eyed, have been forbidden to answer serious questions. Off to one side, however, one of them drops his guard for a moment. His crime, he says, was trying to flee the country; his punishment, he adds, is just.

Even those who benefit from the new order seem split in their allegiances. Many of the youngest of the new corps of Viet Nam's leaders are steadfast in their defense of the system. Still, something of their restlessness comes through. "I have to live very correctly," explains a young official. "I cannot flirt too much, and I must respect older people. I must be very popular, and I cannot have too many luxuries. If I don't like this driver"-- he motions to the man at the wheel--"I must talk to him anyway. I also must dress properly. We cannot have too many levels to our personalities."

Unequivocal devotion to the system is to be found mainly, it seems, among the quiet, leathery revolutionaries who fought the war and who tend not to talk much about the travails that hardened their commitment. Some of their relatives share that strength. At Cu Chi, where entire families once lived in a Viet Cong-built labyrinth of tunnels that snaked along for more than 100 miles beneath U.S. bases, Nguyen Thi Tu, 60, sells fruit to visitors. "I feel better than before," says the bony woman. "We have complete freedom. We can work anywhere. We are not afraid of anything."

Not afraid, perhaps, but sometimes bitter. Villagers around Ben Tre talk of defoliants--Agent Orange--sprayed by U.S. aircraft killing the coconut trees that provided the main source of their income. Vo Van Canh, 49, a former Viet Cong, points to his 17-year-old son, who has the arrested development of a two-year-old, the result, says Vo, of dioxin poisoning. At the Tu Du Women's Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc says her studies, though not conclusive, suggest that women exposed to the defoliants have 15 times as many fetal deaths as those who were not exposed.

The ghosts of war linger everywhere. On a river at Ben Tre, children fish from the bow of a half-submerged U.S. patrol boat; the deck gun is shrouded in laundry. Near the northern port of Da Nang, where a scattering of Soviet and Polish tourists sunbathe on quiet beaches, hillsides are dotted with the carcasses of U.S. armor. At Camp Holloway, in the Central Highlands, youngsters play outside the old U.S. barracks, while visitors can still make out THE SWAMP scrawled across the wall of the club in which helicopter pilots used to unwind. And outside the shattered Citadel in the ancient capital of Hue, where thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed, the air still seems touched by the sickly smell of death.

The U.S. legacy is written most urgently, and perhaps most hauntingly, in the faces of the Amerasian children who cling with desperation to almost any foreigner they encounter. Before opening Ho Chi Minh City's doors to Western newsmen, the government tried to shut away many of these children in a nearby detention center. Last week one boy, barely in his teens, who had escaped the roundup, began holding onto an American journalist, writing down what looked like a G.I. serial number and repeating, over and over, "Papa." Within minutes, a policeman seized the boy and dragged him away in handcuffs. By then, however, the plaintiveness of his appeal, like the toughness of his country, had left its mark.

With reporting by James Willwerth/Ho Chi Minh City